Swarm
by Strati
Summary: An anonymous Cradle patient rambles.


Swarm by Faetis 

I'm sitting on the dirt ground of the Exercise yard watching Florence nurse her 'baby'. Florence is a really sweet little lady. I was a bit surprised to see her tearing off after Matron Arthur with a sharp bit of metal. We had to butcher miss Arthur last week. Gourmet made a 'fillay' of her. Whatever the hell a 'fillay' is, it tasted pretty good. A bit like salty chicken. I run my fingers over the dirt, crushing small dirt clods between my thumb and forefinger. I catch a beetle and smash it between my palms. Crunch! Squish! Heh, I used to be scared of beetles, but now they're scared of me.

I can see the Watcher across the yard. He's worried. The barred door near the lobby is shut tighter than a chastity belt (trust me on that. I know chastity belts). No amount of pushing can get it open. His Royal Madness, our belove'd King, has been playing with the solutions and mechanical things from the 'treatment rooms'. He's planning to blow the door open. That'll be fun. Maybe I can sneak Frederika's viktrola over there and blow the damn thing to hell along with the door. It got knocked down a flight of stairs during our uh… 'Liberation' and now it's permanently warped. She still plays those stupid metal disks on it, though. _At all hours_. The squeaking it makes drives me up the wall… though I must admit it's pretty damn funny to put it outside the staff tower and play the music at top volume. Dr. Ranker's still alive behind the rubble. I can hear him. He starts screeching and weeping something awful when you play those wonky tunes.

What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah. The door. We can't get it open, and there's no other way out of here unless managed to pry the bars off one of the windows and made a jump. Like that'll ever happen. We may have been surrounded by those butchers for a long time, but their madness hasn't rubbed off on us yet. Oh well. I trust the King. Me? I used to clean other peoples houses. The King knows what he's doing. He's the one who invented the plan to free us from the staff. The King is _educated_. He can _read_, for Godsakes. If anyone can blast that door open, it's him. Until then, we'll be okay. Just the happy little nine of us. We are _happy._ This is the first time I've been so happy in so very long. We can survive. Most of the food in the kitchen went nasty a while ago, but there are a few things. Bread, for one. We're up to our eyeballs in stale bread. Stale, but still edible. Other than that, there's still the bodies, and Gourmet's one hell of a cook. I wonder if he'll make another fillay out of Miss Arthur's other leg. She's got enough on her ribs alone to make ten fillays, I'd wager.

The only bad things are the flies and the dreams. The dreams are so strange, and so different than my own. They are _not _my dreams. I know my dreams, and these aren't mine. They belong to someone else. I think that all the dreams from the kids and the staff got loose from their dead heads and are looking for new homes. Either that or I'm getting the dreams from Miss Arthur and that little boy Gourmet made a stew out of. I'm eating their dreams along with their meat. I mentioned this idea to the others. The King said it was the most 'plebian' thing he'd ever heard, but Cordelia said she'd been having weird dreams too. They made her feel sick, she said. Cordelia's been spending more and more time in her room, staring at her birds. I don't see her on the balcony as much.

As for the flies… I can deal with the beetles, but the flies are terrible. They hang around the bodies and make awful noise, even at night. Gourmet started dragging the bodies into the morgue, to keep them from turning so quick, and to keep the flies off. Even so, I swear there are more of them every day. I'm starting to feel sick just thinking about it. Thank the Builder I haven't eaten anything today, or else I'd be tossing everything up right now. I hate the flies. I can hear them everywhere. Buzz buzz buzz all the damn time.

I'm really hungry. I'm gonna go see if any of Miss Arthur is left.


End file.
